Aloha

• Aloha ,the earliest random access method. It was designed for a radio LAN,
but it can be used on any shared medium
• The original ALOHA protocol is called pure ALOHA.
• In pure ALOHA each station sends a frame whenever it has a frame to send.
• However, since there is only one channel to share, there is the possibility of
collision between frames from different stations.
• The pure ALOHA protocol relies on acknowledgments from receiver. When
a station sends a frame, it expects the receiver to send an acknowledgment.
• If the acknowledgment does not arrive after a time-out period, the station
assumes that the frame has been destroyed and resend the frame.
• A collision involves two or more stations. If all these stations try to
resend their frames after the time-out, the frames will collide again.
• Pure ALOHA has a second method to prevent congesting the channel
with retransmitted frames. After a maximum number of retransmission
attempts Kmax, a station must give up and try later.
• The time-out period is equal to the maximum possible round-trip
propagation delay, which is twice the amount of time required to send
a frame between the two most widely separated stations(2xTp).
• The back-off time TB depends on K. For each retransmission, a
multiplier in the range 0 to (2^k-1)
• is randomly chosen and multiplied by Tp orTfr to find TB. Note that
in this procedure, the range of the random numbers increases after
each collision. The value of Kmax is usually chosen as 15.
• Vulnerable time: Vulnerable time is length of time in which there is a
possibility of collision.
 Slotted Aloha
• Slotted ALOHA was invented to improve the efficiency of pure ALOHA.
• In slotted ALOHA we divide the time into slots of Tfr sec and force the
station to send only at the beginning of the time slot.
• In slotted ALOHA a station is allowed to send only at the beginning of the
synchronized time slot, if a station misses this moment, it must wait until
the beginning of the next time slot.
• This means that the station which stated at the beginning of this slot has
already finished sending its frame.
• There is still the possibility of collision if two stations try to send at the
beginning of the same time slot. However, the vulnerable time is now
reduced to one-half equal to Tfr.
• Throughput: The average number of successful transmissions for
slotted ALOHA
• The maximum throughput Smax is 0.368,when G=1. i.e If a frame is
generated during one frame transmission time, then 36.8 percent of
these frames reach their destination successfully because the
vulnerable time is equal to the frame transmission time(Tfr).
• If a station generates only one frame in this vulnerable time, the frame
will reach its destination successfully.